Hamilton: Colorado voting: The untold story

This particular column does not support any particular Republican presidential candidate. What this column does is demonstrate how the Major Media mislead the American public when it contends that no one in Colorado got to vote for the 34 “unbound” delegates who will attend the GOP national convention in July.

Here is what actually happened: We voted with our feet to attend our local precinct caucus. After being vetted as bona fide precinct members, we listened to the other attendees and voted for the ones we felt should attend our county convention. Yours truly was voted to attend the county convention. Twenty-five days later, Wonder Wife and I devoted a Sunday afternoon to attending the county convention. At the county convention, we listened to those who wanted to be voted on to the state convention. I voted for the delegates who sounded like prudent people. Later, each congressional district held a convention where those delegates got to vote once again.

When the state delegates got to the state convention, they were each given a moment to address their fellow state delegates. The state delegates then voted for those delegates whom they wanted to send to Cleveland in July. Thirty-four delegates were elected as “unbound” delegates.

Largely ignored by the Major Media is that Colorado held a state convention so Colorado could elect “unbound” delegates. If Colorado had held a state-wide straw poll, Colorado’s delegates would have been “bound” before they got to Cleveland. That all but two of them expressed a preference for one particular presidential candidate is a function of who came to speak to them in Colorado Springs and which candidate had the best “ground game.”

Despite the Major Media canard that no one voted in Colorado, thousands of individual votes were cast — from precinct to county to district to state. Even so, it can fairly be said that a party direct-primary election would be a more accurate reflection of the entirety of GOP political opinion across the entire state.

But still, the people who cast all the votes described above, are people for whom party politics is their avocation. They take their own time and money to attend these events, beginning with their local precinct caucuses. They are people who spend their time debating public policy issues and spend their money going to political events rather than spend their time and money engaging in other avocations.

Granted, the political “junkies” are not fully representative of the other party members who do not take the time to delve into the issues or spend their time and money attending political events. And yes, a state-wide, party primary election would collect the votes of many more party members; however, any reasonable person would have to concede that the general run of direct-primary voters are not the most informed or highly motivated. (As Winston Churchill famously said: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.”)

Colorado’s “unbound” delegates were decided upon by those who demonstrated a keen interest in politics with their feet, their votes, and their pocketbooks. While maybe not the absolute best system, the caucus/convention method did not deserve the falsehood that “no one voted in Colorado.”

Nationally syndicated columnist, William Hamilton, is a laureate of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, the Colorado Aviation Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma University Army ROTC Wall of Fame, and is a recipient of the University of Nebraska 2015 Alumni Achievement Award. He was educated at the University of Oklahoma, the Army Language School, the George Washington University, the Infantry School, the U.S Naval War College, the University of Nebraska, and Harvard University.

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